Harding Icefield

Uh, I think I take my marching orders from what Faulkner said in, uh, his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and that is, "The only subject for a writer is the human heart in conflict with itself," which is an impossible order, but that's the goal.

This piece is called In the Very Big Ice House: Travels on the Harding Icefield.

It begins with two epigraphs.

"But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul, and more strange, and far more portentous, why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity, and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind." That's from Melville's Moby-Dick, Chapter 42.

Thus, ice ages come and go within 100,000 years.

Our own Green Glacier is a remnant of the last ice age, as well as an offshoot of the Harding Ice Field.

While changes in glaciers such as recession and advance used to occur because of the natural cycle of glacial periods, climate change has created an irregularity which in turn has caused growing to recede at a rate that is far greater than the natural cycle.

Will glaciers return in the future? We don't know.